


to quench this burning thing

by Anonymous



Category: Polygon/McElroy Vlogs & Podcasts RPF
Genre: Horror, Lighthouse Keeper AU, M/M, Other, Tentacles, dubcon, mention of self-injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-30
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2021-02-26 10:09:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22483438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The last thing Pat remembers—as sailors always should—is the clutch of the cold sea.[in tandem withthe universe alone]
Relationships: Brian David Gilbert/Patrick Gill
Comments: 4
Kudos: 38
Collections: Anonymous





	to quench this burning thing

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [the universe alone](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22482712) by Anonymous. 

_ The windy waves mount up and curve and fall,  
_ _ And round the rocks the foam blows up like snow, —  
_ _ Tho' I am inland far, I hear and know,  
_ _ For I was born the sea's eternal thrall. _

_from _"_Sea Longing" __by Sarah Teasdale _

* * *

The last thing Pat remembers—as sailors always should—is the clutch of the cold sea. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Where he wakes there’s no sound. Just fingers rubbery with cold, pulling at what used to be a body, now a constellation of wet pain-feelings painted on the shell of a man. 

Sensation ebbs, and flows. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The tide comes in, of weight and thirst. Heavy rough hot like molten lead. Pinned with something, laden, the weight of wreckage on a sun-bleached beach or piled high with silken blankets in a princess’s bed. Or just the burden of his body itself, such as it is. 

The thirst is terrible, blood and salt. He begs for water and the universe provides. 

No sound, no sense, nothing to catch the wind. The water-bringer is a man with owl pale eyes. The pleasant vision of a dying sailor. Good men see angels beckon, call to them through the storm. The wicked reach but plunge below, tendrilous darkness lick the edges of view, frigid and swift and burning. 

Pat withdraws his hand. He knows what kind of man he is. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Uncertain, soundless, Pat returns to time. He doesn’t wish to. Better perhaps to leave it unfound, to drift and float unmoored forever, to let the inevitable wash over you and win. 

But to sail is to fight the sea. 

Patrick’s body creaks with screaming protest as he rises, tries to stand. He stagger-falls at once, back to the pile of blankets he sprung from, that he’s never seen before. His legs are a coil of rope. 

The angel reappears. 

“Where am I?” Pat gets out, unsure what kinds of answers mortals can expect.

“The lighthouse,” says the angel, short but not unkind. “I’m the keeper. Brian.”

A hand juts out. Pat blinks at it. Angels shake hands? Eventually he lurches some words off of his tongue—his name, he thinks, at least—and steels his courage, and reaches out, and touches. 

The hand is warm and calloused, like a human’s would be. The youth laughs at him, as they touch. It’s lovely, bright and pealing-out, a bubbling of amusement from toes to golden-tawny hair. Pat smiles, though he doesn’t understand. There’s nothing cruel in it, no lick of judgment or of doom. Not an angel, then, not solemn-faced and wispy stuff of heavens. Perhaps he’s something older, wilder, like the tales of _ aes sídhe _that live and love and laugh beyond the Western sea. 

Yes, that fits better. 

A fickle fae creature that’s simply amused, that Pat is there, and alive, and seated before him fragile and aching and vulnerable to the whims of the sea. 

“It’s just that—” he’s cute, almost apologetic in his mirth, “—you’d have had a better time. If you had gills.” 

Angel or merrow or _ gancanagh _, or just kind human lighthouse-keeper, Brian’s warm and welcoming and Pat should keep on his good side, most like. He accepts the offer of warm dry clothes and waits a minute more of smiled conversation before he bends his head to his hands and tries to blot out the ache of roiling memory. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Brian makes stew. If he’s fae, that’s it, truly, his granda would say. You eat their food and you never leave. 

“Do you remember where you were headed, Gill?” The words sound normal, but Brian’s stare is ethereally keen. 

Pat doesn’t, and says so. This isn’t as strange as Brian’s shifting frown suggests. The landlorn need to know where they’re going, how best to get there, when they set off. It’s not so complicated at sea. Wherever you’re bound, you’re all headed there together, and you needn’t think of it often. 

The stew tastes like human food. Unmagical. Not unlike the hearty meals his grandma made, pepper-and-wine and warmth and toil. 

“I don’t know how many of us there were. Or how many lifeboats.” Pat says slowly, around his meal. That lapse in memory isn’t painful, but other spots ache. “I feel like I wasn’t alone in mine.”

The youth—Brian, Brian—doesn’t know what to do with that, and neither does Pat. Maybe one day it’ll rush back in like the tide, what he was doing, who with, how it ended. Or maybe the sea’s taken that too. 

They don’t speak much more, which is a mercy. Words rattle painfully in Patrick’s head, let alone their meanings. He’s warm and dry, and the stew is hot, and he’s not pressed to remember all things tonight. He can just eat, and sleep, and be grateful for the sea’s mercies. For Brian’s mercies. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Patrick returns to himself, in the next few days. His odd fancies of faeries and angels leave him as his strength returns; his memories slot back into place, unremarkable and unremarked. 

Brian is a gentle soul. He’s given up his own simple bed, Pat realizes by-the-by, and kips on the floor of the kitchen, by the glow of the hob. That’s not necessary, Patrick tries to reason with him—he’s the interloper—he should be on the floor, if anyone—but Brian waves him off. 

“You’re still recovering,” he chirps and smiles and cocks his head. He’s birdlike, lit with keen-eyed joy. “It’s no trouble.” 

It _ is _trouble, Pat bickers back, though it’s also painfully true his body is still mending its cracks and bruises. Most things are coming back—the way a knot feels in his hands, the moments in time, his where and whens. But still, some things are not right in his head. A strange darkness lurks on the edges of his vision, curls tendrils and threatens to overwhelm him. He can’t sleep some nights, for the ache of imagined moaning. 

And some mad part of him hopes still that Brian _ is _a faerie changeling, and has taken a liking to Patrick and will never let him free. 

He’s not well, but he’s not an invalid. They agree to trade off, days and nights, since Brian keeps the watch and sleeps the day and Patrick rises at dawn anyway. It’s quiet but not lonely, in the daytime, but Pat cherishes the liminal hours, the overlap the most. Brian speaks with an eagerness, a bottomless well of quick-thinking moments threaded together with lightness. He loves songs, and sings them a hell of a lot sweeter than Patrick ever did, in rusty tones below-deck or above. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Most nights, Pat retires early. The injury tires him, and he likes to sit and think, perhaps scoop up his memories in his palm and see how they trickle out. But tonight his thoughts veer too hard a-port, drive into unsafe waters. 

So he asks if Brian needs a hand, lighting the lamp, taking his watch. The task is simple, on a clear day like today. It takes a little time, but soon they’re just sitting, feet hanging-down toward the rocky shore, talking close but loud into the salt-spray air. Brian’s never sailed, but he knows the sea well in his way, watching and waiting for its terrible whims to dash brutes like Pat against his shore. He tells of tides and swimming against the ripcurrents, of storms and floods so fierce they smash the gulls’ nests on the shore and send up a wail of a thousand grief-stricken creatures. 

To hear him tell it, she sounds like a strange and feral beast. So different from what Pat knows. He’s lived near his whole life on the sea, fighting her fury and enjoying the fruits of her labors, her moments of sleep and quiet stillness. It sounds like she is never still here—ever smashing on the rocks—and when she batters against him Brian has learned to do nothing but wait, patient, for her inevitable forgiveness. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Brian is a beautiful distant shore, and Pat is a selfish man of the sea, and eventually he sets himself, by instinct, to plundering. 

He doesn’t remember who moves first—who pulls at whose clothes—though all the clothes are Brian’s—but Pat knows it’s him who navigates them further, who presses his hands flat-palmed against Brian’s shoulders, who squares them against the bookcase and drives down into his mouth with passion unreasonable in the morning hours. Brian tastes like cream, and salt; sweet and real and yielding; his skin an after-dinner drink quaffed foolishly in the light of day. 

“Mmm, _ God _,” Pat moans when Brian’s teeth find his neck, scrape and suck against the throbbing of his pulse like Patrick, too, tastes honeyed by desire. 

Ever impatient, he hitches Brian’s leg up, yanks at his sweater, stretching the corded wool, and— 

freezes. Holy saint Brendan of— 

he’s _ racked _with bruises, blue-blooming on his pale and fragile skin. They wrap his ribs, his arms, the soft ivory shelf of his delicate collarbone. Like a topman who fell into the rigging, both saved and lashed by the ropes that tore him from the grips of death below. 

Brian would be agile, swift, climbing up the mast—but that isn’t the life he’s chosen. He’s alone on this island, with his light, and himself, and now with Pat. 

Who the _ fuck _— 

“It’s nothing,” Brian says, turns his chin down and his gaze away. “Don’t—”

He doesn’t finish it, either lie or command, but the dismissal’s clear. His voice wavers with shame and something half-a-step from fear. Apology, maybe. 

Patrick scowls. “Who did this,” he says again, and his grasp is firm enough that Brian has to struggle to untangle himself. Pat’s unrelenting, until he thinks—_ am I making him wince, like that?— _and then his fingers fall limp and let the body before him slip away and back. 

“Don’t worry,” Brian smiles loose and easeful, but his arms are curled tight around his naked chest. “I bruise too easy. Family trait.” 

This pauses Pat momentarily—that could be true, yes? could it? a clan of fragile beautiful Gilberts, aching for the sea but too easily hurt to— 

no, no, even a _ sickness _couldn’t take you like that, those welts— 

“I don’t buy that,” Pat growls, though the wheels spin in his brain to find some other story he _ would _buy. What accusation can he fling against this lively lovely creature lashed with bruises. Pat reaches out again, to touch them, as if his fingertips will eke out the secrets his eyes and brain can’t see. 

“Get off me,” Brian growls, and jumps back hard and sharp as a flint. “What right’ve you? 

None, of course, but Pat’s well-used to charting waters where he’s not wanted. “Don’t be a fool. You’re hurt. Who’s hurting you? There’s no one—”

“There’s no one,” Brian agrees, a tone that wants to cut bait and head home. 

“Are you hurting yourself?” Pat tries, because he’s a simple-foolish man and there’s naught in those livid bruises that he understands. 

“No,” Brian scoffs. “Mind your own business, _ sailor, _before you wreck again.” He shoves off angrily and flees to where Pat has no right to follow. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The next few days are wretched; watching, waiting. Patrick wonders if this is what it’s like, to keep a lighthouse. To hang in every moment, staring uneasy at the shore, the gathering storm. To wait for the next disaster. 

He starts to wonder if the voices he hears, the whispered wailings in the wind, are more than scattered nightmares. The howlings of some faerie host, come to punish their selkie child for taking a mortal as a lover. That’s madness, of course. The kind of silly daydreams sailors indulge, in long and droning weeks at sea. 

And yet. And yet. He’s _ in pain. _Patrick didn’t imagine that. Did he?

No, no; that was as real as sand and grit. It must be true. It must be. Pat’s never felt anything more real than the taste of Brian’s skin, the heat of him below his fingers. If that was all imagined, then this is—this all is just— 

he reaches out on impulse, to Brian’s hand. It’s breakfastime for Patrick but supper for his host, who sleeps limp and vulnerable all day and does his quiet, secret work at night. He’s tired, Pat thinks, so he startles—but he startles more than tiredness should allow, jumps back like he’s been bitten, face cold with fear that sends him stumbling. 

“Brian, I—” Pat stands as well, slow, gentling. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

“Nothing! Forgot I need—need to check the stores. For more coffee!” he squawks like a startled gull and flees. 

A decent man would let him go, compose himself. Patrick follows after. He’s heavy on his feet, feeling both small and overlarge and desperate but unworthy for forgiveness. He’s not sure what precisely he’s done wrong—though gods, his mind can invent a dozen wretched things—but he knows he’d rather forty lashes than put that look, again, on Brian’s face. 

The body sways away from him, at first, but yields to only a soft touch, a word. Brian looks so young as he crumples, falls apart, loosens the fear-tight posture of his body and drags through a dozen several sentences. They sting and echo sweet in Patrick’s ears. _ I’m so lonely here—it’s so quiet—I’ve never had anyone—what will I do when you go— _

“You’ll go back to the sea and I’ll have no one,” he shudders in something like despair. “How can I let you—why would I give myself _ more _to miss.” 

It doesn’t make things clear, but Pat drinks it up like sweet rainwater, and lets his body try to understand. He curls the fragile trembling body to him, and this time isn’t pushed away. Brian seems hungry for him, driving closer, desperate, lets Pat’s hands press up cool against hot skin and soothe his shaking. He curls his fingers in Pat’s messy locks and binds them close together, for a moment.

It explains nothing, but it feels like forgiveness

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


The mystery thickens nightly while Pat sleeps. When he sleeps. He finds himself sitting up on their shift-shared cot many late hours, staring out into the wind or rain or soft and even dark with its deceptive peacefulness. It’s a lie, as sure as Brian’s slanted smile. 

It’s not _ nothing. _

It’s not a figment of Pat’s storm-cracked mind. How he _ winces _. How one day his shirt slips to unveil a forearm purple-green. How when he pulls his shoes off in the morning warmth and falls exhausted into bed—he looks battered of spirit, and his ankles are ringed with red. 

Pat has to let go of the _ who _, let it rattle through his mind unanswered and drive him mad. There’s no one here. No secret intruder lurks in the night— 

oh, Patrick has watched for them, stayed up all the night, searched every hiding place by day. But there’s no trace of some evasive stranger. There’s just Brian, who seems so gentle. And there’s Pat, who pinched himself awake all night, for fear he might—that he was—a man possessed— 

but no, the bruises still struck and shifted, even when Pat was sleepless. 

Pat thrusts his frustrated confusion into his kisses, never pursues when Brian shivers and sighs and suddenly flees his touches. It’s impossible to know, what demons he’s trying to appease, real or imagined; but Pat tries not to press on things Brian wants unseen. He tries to be satisfied with the heat of burning skin and the whisper of distant desire. With the soft curve of Brian’s tired body into his, safe and secure and suffering in some secret way. 

  
  
  
  
  


The mystery breaks like the eye of a storm. Reprieve, and then the onslaught. 

The wailing of the wind is still, that night, and still Patrick can’t sleep. There’s just something inside him that misses the rock of the waves. He hasn’t been on shore for this long since he was an eager, scrawny cabin boy. 

What possesses him to head up to the light? He doesn’t know. He was invited, once. Since then he’s been rebuffed, quite fiercely—Brian’s protecting perhaps some secret goings-on, perhaps just his privacy that Pat’s so thoroughly invaded. It must be strange, to live alone for years, and suddenly have some meddling sailor just _ there. _Brian seems to like Pat well enough, but maybe that’s just his loneliness run wild. Maybe the thrum of alien presence stirs up in Brian such unrest he cannot bear it—maybe his injuries are something he can’t help— 

This train of thought sets him pacing, and pacing to wandering, and wandering to wending up the stair and pressing in the door to the very sanctum where Brian tends to flee. It’s fear of darkness, maybe, that drags him here, but how can he rest when he doesn’t know, when in just a few days he’ll _ never _know if— 

and then in a fistful of moments he knows, and it is terrible. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


Some— 

_ something _ has Brian fast. That’s all Patrick can eke before his heart beats sense out of his chest, fills him with red-blooded panic. He might not be in pain—Brian looks calm, resigned, or more _ serene _as tendrils wend around him, arm and leg, skin pale under Their tight grip. 

Pat takes a step—forward or fleeing, he can’t for the life of him tell—and that’s all, that’s all he’s allowed, before They have him too. 

They trip him by the ankles, catch his hands, send him sprawling hard enough to break his nose if they did not also push and guide, like felling a tree. He tries not to cry out, even in the moment that he can—what shards of reason he’s got left hang on Brian’s open-mouthed expression, his sudden gaze of fear and horror.

“Patrick—!”

_ This is what he was afraid of _, Pat thinks as he is bound and trammeled by a dozen touches, wilder far than hands or arms or cold insistent fingers. They let him thrash and tense, coming from nowhere, yielding to nothing, and at his resistance only redouble their grip. They could break bones, he knows immediately, as he forces down his savage urge to fight. It’s only their mercy that is keeping his ribs uncracked. 

The taste is oddly neutral, just the salt-warm of the sea where they stretch his jaw and stifle him to silence. 

God, how does Brian bear— 

but he’s bearing it, clearly, with patience Patrick hopes to live to test. He’s still, stills himself, as They clutch his legs and wrist and throat and slither-slide against the private places of his body. The places Pat’s been longing, aching to touch. Is that why he hasn’t been allowed? Is Brian _ Theirs _? 

Pat would laugh darkly, if he could, at the tentacle that jerks his hair and forces his gaze toward the encircled lighthouse-keeper. Where else would he look? What else could he want to see? 

A tendril slides under the hem of Brian’s shirt, and Patrick feels the echo in his own hand, where he’s done that before, where he’s hoped to do so again. He feels horror, protective, athirst to fight—but also a sort of desperate—joy—that he’s here, that he can see—Brian’s been _ alone _— 

They do not seem unworldly torturers, yet. Brian’s well-trapped but calm as They rake over him, black as ink, an unsettling blackness. They seem like They should leave trace-trails of slime, of damp, of black discoloration, but there’s nothing in Their wake, like They are figments of a troubled dream. They fondle Brian’s clothes open, dexterous, popping each button in turn, caressing flesh that they expose. Slow, thorough, they tease at every several part of him, in lush succession and then vigorous synchrony. Through it all, his head lolls limp. You could imagine he was sleeping, if not for the sparse groans of pain or pleasure, or maybe both the two at once. 

It’s terrible, the swell between Pat’s legs—building, burning with heat. His mind’s gone, he’s sure, given over to madness, to wretched impotence and an odd sense of calm. Placid resignation is foreign on his skin, his body. No orders, no plan, no screamed instructions lost into the wind. Catastrophe on a ship isn’t like _ this_. You run, you heave, you yell, you _ do something, _and keep so doing until you fix it or you die. 

Whichever fate he’s bound for now is not for mortals to say. This is a strange and terrible way to end, maybe, but Patrick can’t deny that his last thoughts—he’s greedy, to see more of Brian’s pale bright skin, to hear him groan again with lust and need.

They brush against him, the slick-dry curls between Pat’s legs, and find his shame as quick and sure as a dart. First, They brush, then press, then wrap him sudden and wrench from his lips a sound of pleasure and dread. 

Maybe it’s interesting, this sound. Or the feel, of having a new body at Their mercy. They shift snakelike, uncoil against his skin, unbow him from his forced posture of attention. They stretch each of his limbs, tug and slide along, a careful mate checking the soundness of the sails. Pat whimpers, first in fear—Their steely grip along his wrists, his ankles, surely he will be torn asunder—but whatever Their motive it doesn’t end in pain. They hold him taut and slide up and down his legs, his arms, sneak into the corners of his clothes and tease against his cock with alien sensation. 

Pat gasps and tries desperately to still, to let Them have their way. Brian looked pliant and willing beneath Their grasp, and he yet lives. It’s not hard to guess what They want, as They rip free the borrowed clothes and bare the entirety of Patrick’s body to their meticulous exploration. 

How can he—what is he—how does Brian— 

—Brian’s so _ calm _ , as They slide slick-soft-smooth down the small of his back, sneak into the crease of him and tease just a gentle tip into his hole. It can’t be seen, but Pat knows it, he _ knows _it, from the slack flutter of Brian’s expression and the squirm of his hips, wedged firm by tentacles like iron bands. Patrick knows it, because he feels it on his skin, just the same, except the tense and pull of his muscles bucking against it, inelegant, futile. He sucks air around Them, wrapped by Them, and tries wetly to learn from Brian’s body how to move, to still, to save himself from pain. He’s never been a quick study. 

Brian’s beautiful, even with his arms drawn above his head and his knees forced wide—maybe _ especially _so. This echoes somewhere damp and foul, uncomfortably close to late-night dreams Patrick tries to unrecall—the worser parts of him—in sleep, unabashed about betraying the hospitality of his host— 

Well, it would be a it would be a lie to say he hasn’t thought about how Brian’s brow would furrow on a whimper, as he’s first stretched on one of Pat’s slim fingers. How any hint of pain could be kissed off his brow, hushed into pants of need. God, he never dreamed he’d see it like _ this _, though, half-hard and held fast across the room, some ugly monstrosity the tool that breaches Brian’s willing body and draws into him gasps of pleasure. That cradles him and also refuses to let him free. 

Pat’s own body is harder to tame. It would be good sense, to let himself be taken, to succumb, but everything in Patrick urges to thrash and gasp and keep himself afloat. They’re less kind, he thinks, because of his sailor’s instincts. They breach him blunt and prickling and refuse to cradle his traitorous cock, bobbing red before him, even as Brian keens with Their kinder ministrations. 

there’s nothing— 

_ God _— 

there’s nothing Pat can do. 

  
  
  
  
  


Why not enjoy what one first learns to bear? 

Bent double, teary-eyed with the stretch of it he—  
he’s grateful to be met with Brian’s mouth, to hook the strange sensations to familiar and entwine them carefully together. 

The thing paws at them like a blind creature, trying to understand the bare human emotion of that kiss, the dozen things Pat wants to but is not permitted to say, to his strange fair lighthouse-keeper who’s made his business Pat’s salvation. 

Some intention shifts, and drags Patrick down, away. Brian whines at the loss and it’s a pang in his heart, that wordless sound of one bereft. he opens his mouth to call out, shifts to reach but— 

They don’t like that, don’t trust him maybe, with Their child. he whimpers as they wrap around his neck, not tight enough to choke but insistent so he feels the pressure on his throat from outside and within. they test his limits, which are deep and wide but mortal in their dimensions. 

It’s long moments later when Pat can return his attention, realize that Brian is bound to him, arms lashed together but also gripping tight, a point of contact on which the tide can break. He sobs in thankfulness and need, though not a lick of it could be heard through the sound and silence. 

Oh god, he’s held so deeply, stretched to the breaking, not sure whether to weep or whine. Gods, Brian would have more mercy than this, he thinks—Brian would _ touch _him, at least, while taking him apart, would coo soft kindnesses while Patrick writhed on him, stuck fast and overstimulated and still aching for more— 

It’s a mercy, that in the scattered cataplex of Pat’s sundered attention, he sees Brian peak and give way. He’s beautiful, more beautiful wreathed in darkness, pale cheeks rubbed pink by friction and the heat of exertion, pale eyes cloud, a moment of unseeing interrupts their vivid gaze on Patrick. 

Then all is rank sensation, dark and reckless. The thud of Brian’s body on his own. The pull and drag of tendrils every way. The stretch, the pulse of blood, the rush of molten joy that would buckle his knees if ever again he were permitted to stand. There’s nothing Pat has ever felt like this, no place he’s voyaged stranger and more wild. 

Brian holds him, while he comes, and it’s as good as he dreamed. 

There’s a queer gratefulness in him, after, that he’s being so thoroughly held and not permitted quite yet to come apart. The purr of Brian’s breath against his chest. Sated and exhausted, his fingers curled in Patrick’s hair. He’s _falling _ _ asleep_. What a strange little creature. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


To be a seaman is to be a trifle mad. To hove toward danger, rather than away. Patrick could never leave the sea he knows, his tepid-tempest mistress, but in Brian there’s something that calls to him like a siren.

Sailors are foolish, and they answer that call.


End file.
